(Updated with funeral information.) Rev. Dr. Curtis Cofield II, the “dean” of Connecticut’s black Baptists and a champion of New Haven’s homeless and people with AIDS, passed away early Friday morning.
The longtime leader of Immanuel Baptist Church died after falling down the stairs of his Roydon Road home at around 4 a.m., according to his daughter Bonnie. She said her father was preparing to leave on a trip to Virginia with his wife Elsie to attend a ministers’ wives convention.
Rev. Cofield turned 82 on March 18.
Viewing hours will take place at Immanuel Baptist on Tuesday from 4 to 9 p.m. At 7 p.m. visitors will have an “opportunity to bring remarks”; from 8 to 9 p.m. a memorial will take place.
The funeral is scheduled for Wednesday at Immanuel Baptist (1324 Chapel St.) Viewing hours are 9 to 10 a.m. The service begins at 10 a.m.
Immanuel Baptist is asking attendees Wednesday to carpool, at least three to a car, because the church’s lot and surrounding streets cannot accommodate the large numbers of people planning to attend.
Curtis and Elsie Cofield have been best known and widely honored in town the past few decades for opening a soup kitchen at the church, a church-run homeless shelter on Grand Avenue, and the AIDS Interfaith Network. An annual community-wide service in honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday takes place at Immanuel Baptist. So does a commemoration of people who lost their lives to AIDS.
First Rev. Cofield became known as the pioneer of black Baptist churches in the state. Immanuel Baptist is the oldest. He ran it for 32 years until his retirement seven years ago, by which point the congregation had grown to 700 families. Since then he has served as interim pastor at black Baptist churches that spun off from Immanuel Baptist in Hamden, Milford, and New Haven.
“He was the dean of black Baptists in the state,” said Rev. Samuel Ross-Lee, his successor at Immanuel Baptist. “He exemplified that role in exquisite fashion. He built a multi-million-dollar building when people told him it was not possible for African-Americans to do that.”
Ross-Lee spoke of how in retirement Rev. Cofield often returned to the pulpit to preside over funerals of older members. “I was always struck by how intimately he knew them, their hobbies, their likes and dislikes,” he said.
Curtis Cofield accumulated over 20,000 books during his lifetime. He began donating them to the Stetson branch library on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
At the time, he told the Independent that his book addiction developed when he was a young African-American child growing up in rural North Carolina. “The racial tension and segregation meant that you were not allowed to be in a lot of areas. And so, in order to spend your time well, my mother and father put into my head, ‘You can go anywhere through books.’ So books became the way I overrode all those things to know the world. And that’s why books became so important to me. I’ve been collecting books since I was four years old. It was kind of like a fetish with me,” he admitted. “Out of my ten-cent allowance, I bought some five cent classics” by authors like Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others.
(Click here to read a full article about that.)
Curtis and Elsie Cofield took on the challenge of serving people with AIDS long before it became a popular cause in either the black community or the broader community. Click here to read a New York Times profile of the couple and their work on AIDS.
“Each of us has an obligation to be dreamers and to set forth some project that moves forward, not just the nation but for everyone for a better brotherhood and livelihood,” Rev. Cofield said in this 2006 WTNH interview about Coretta Scott King.
Along with his wife of almost 60 years, Elsie, he is survived by daughters Curtissa and Bonnye and son Curtis, and several grandchildren and greatgrandchildren. He was pre-deceased by his daughter Renee Cofield Boyd.
Rev. Cofield was a impeccable man of God. Growing up under his pastorship in the 60's and 70's helped to form the foundation for my faith in God. I always thought Rev. Cofield was the "coolest" guy and so easy to talk to. He will be missed by many, but his legacy will live on.
My love, prayers and deepest condolences to the Cofield family.
Be encouraged!
Terri Tolliver Butts